The Role of Astrology in a Civilization
in Crisis

by Professor Richard Tarnas

In a world undergoing such fundamental and rapid
transformation on all fronts, what role can be played by the newly
thriving yet still marginalized practice of astrology – at once the gold
standard of superstition in our culture, yet for the initiated, capable of
uniquely illuminating virtually every realm of human experience? How can
we hold this paradox? And what might be the historical role of the
astrological community itself, carrying principles and perspectives so
contrary to the mainstream culture’s assumptions about the nature of the
cosmos?

I would like to thank the Association for this honor – Roy, Wendy,
the committee, and also Nick Campion for the invitation for me to give
this lecture years ago when I could not accept because it coincided with
the date of my son’s wedding. Let me especially acknowledge and remember
Charles Harvey here, deep friend and deeply missed, who first brought me
into the Association over thirty-five years ago, through Giles Healey and
his friendship with Charles and with John Addey, both of whom came to
visit me in the 1970s at Esalen Institute in California. Speaking of
these revered friends and elders, I also sense the presence with us today
of that long procession of luminaries who have given the Carter Memorial
lectures before me, some of whom are present in the room today. And of
course we think of Charles Carter himself.

In my short time with you now, I want to address two major themes,
for the two halves of my lecture:

First, the possibility and the necessity of astrology in our
postmodern age; and

Second, the astrological community’s special role in this age, its
particular challenges and, as it were, the demands of its particular
initiatory journey.

Part I

Everyone here feels the unique and poignant paradox of astrology
in our time: Astrologers know that their perspective provides an
extraordinary source of illumination for virtually every area of human
experience: biography, psychology, political and cultural history, social
science, archaeology, contemporary events, economics, philosophy,
cosmology, religion, the arts. All of us who have been initiated into the
astrological paradigm possess a tremendous tool for human
self-understanding and a more intelligently participatory relationship
with the cosmos.

We know that astrology should be held in high regard in our
culture, yet we have had the peculiar experience of living in an era when
it has been regarded by the established intellectual authorities as the
most lowly and regrettable of superstitions. In fact, it is the gold
standard of superstition in our culture, exactly what one points to if
one wants to stress the ludicrousness of a particular belief or practice.
It is over our civilization’s paradigm boundary line of plausible
discourse: scorned and ridiculed, unworthy of rational examination,
beyond serious discussion, beneath contempt.

Now from a very transcendent perspective, perhaps this is right
and just: Hasn’t it always been thus with the greatest spiritual
treasures? They are veiled, hidden, so encompassing yet so invisible –
as encompassing as the starry night sky, one might say, yet as invisible
as those stars might appear from the streets and buildings of a brightly
lit modern city.

And for us personally as astrologers, perhaps this paradox has a
valuable psychologically compensatory role, counteracting how inflated
one might otherwise become as a result of possessing such an incalculable
privilege, to be graciously given such astonishing, detailed, access to
the inner workings, the sheer beauty, of the anima mundi. It
keeps us humble.

For this enormous development of our bright modern
solar consciousness left out the depths, the lunar mystery, the soul of
the cosmos

So we know where astrology should stand in the culture,
as it already stands in our own lives—yet we are acutely aware of how far
from that deserved place it does stand. The tension of opposites between
these two poles could hardly be more tautly drawn. Yet we know from Jung,
and also from Hegel, and from William Blake, that it is precisely out of
such a tension of contraries that something extraordinary and
unprecedented can be born, something new that transcends the opposition
and brings the polarity into a higher, richer, more life-enhancing
synthesis, a coniunctio oppositorum. But it takes making the
tension fully conscious, exploring and experiencing it deeply, even
painfully, before whatever is to come will come — in the fullness of
time, and in a way none of us could predict.

I also believe that astrology’s negation by the larger society in
the course of the modern era can be seen as quite understandable in a
different respect, for as it was and still is widely understood and
practiced, astrology in a sense had to be rejected for the full
emergence of the autonomous modern self, of the individual mind and will
free and self-responsible in a cosmos that did not embody a pregiven
structure of meanings and purposes. That pregiven structure of meaning
may have been governed by God, king, or stars, and interpreted by
external religious or political or astrological authority, but it
ultimately was a cosmic order that the self had to align with or submit
to. By contrast, this new, modern form of human being could be
self-defining in a neutral, radically open indeterminate universe.

But this unprecedented revolution of modern consciousness and
cosmology also led to the hubris of modern “Man”, divinely capitalized
and masculinized, the highest form of intelligence and purposeful
volition in the known universe, the Cartesian monotheistic ego in a
disenchanted cosmos, rationally calculating and exploiting the
neutralized object of a world void of intrinsic meaning. And eventually,
in a kind of boomerang of the reductionist perspective, even this exalted
man was reduced to the “nothing but” of random evolving matter and
energy, genes and neurons, instincts and needs.

And now for something completely different. Let me bring in
here the brilliant perspective of my good friend and well-known British
philosopher John Cleese. John is a closet intellectual, knowledgeable in
science, and very psychological. He is also the Trickster, the jester in
the court. The Trickster can say things that no one else in the court is
permitted to say – he can speak truth to power, point out the nature of
the emperor’s new clothes, with the impunity of laughter. Over the last
decade or so we’ve done a number of collaborations together, including a
memorable graduate seminar on the nature of the comic genius as seen from
multiple perspectives, philosophical, psychogical, cultural,
astrological. While he was living in California, he made a number of
skits, and I’d like to play this one, about 3 minutes long, as it is
relevant to our discussion today.

Youtube video link for John Cleese, “The Scientist”

The Trickster, whether in a society or a psyche, acts as a
compensatory correction of the one-sidedness of the powers that be, of
the ego function, the pretender to the throne. And in this skit we see a
splendid embodiment of the later postmodern sensibility at its best, the
recognition of the multiplicity of being, sharpened by irony, that
perfectly pitched reflexivity by which the modern mind inadvertently
sends up its own position. It laughs at itself as it laughs at the
dominant bullies of our civilizational mindset, catching in one net both
religious and scientific fundamentalism, simplistic literalism, and the
“just-so” stories of mechanistic explanations that are transformed into
scientific fact with a kind of quasi-biblical authority for the
simple-minded.

By the way, we might also take this gift of the postmodern comic
genius to recognize an aspect of astrology’s own shadow, that need to
explain, and explain away, everything within its own particular
conceptual framework (“Oh, that of course is explained by your
Chiron/South Node midpoint square your Scorpio Vesta intercepted in the
12th house”).

The great Harvard-Berkeley scholar Robert Bellah, not long before
he died this summer at the age of 86, published his magnum opus
Religion in Human Evolution, one of the most brilliant
contributions to human self-understanding in our time. But already in a
lecture given during that annus mirabilis of 1969, Bellah eloquently
described the challenge and the possibility carried by our extraordinary
time:

We may be seeing the beginnings of the reintegration of our
culture, a new possibility of the unity of consciousness. If so, it will
not be on the basis of any new orthodoxy, either religious or scientific.
Such a new integration will be based on the rejection of all univocal
understandings of reality, of all identifications of one conception of
reality with reality itself. It will recognize the multiplicity of the
human spirit, and the necessity to translate constantly between different
scientific and imaginative vocabularies. It will recognize the human
proclivity to fall comfortably into some single literal interpretation of
the world and therefore the necessity to be continuously open to rebirth
in a new heaven and a new earth. It will recognize that in both
scientific and religious culture all we have finally are symbols, but
that there is an enormous difference between the dead letter and the
living word.

And now I want to take the liberty of sharing one other brief
video clip, one that we astrologers will perhaps appreciate at more
levels than most would be able to. This is a preview or trailer for a
documentary film called “The City Dark” which the producers have kindly
permitted me to share with you here.

One thinks of Heidegger (and I’m paraphrasing): “Mortals have
turned night into day, and day into a state of harassed unrest.” But it
is astrologers who especially know the larger meaning of this phenomenon,
of this living parable: for the night sky carries the deeper meaning of
the day. It discloses the soul of the world. Thus Nietzsche, in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra: “The world is deep: deeper than day can
comprehend.”

Our civilization is the most brilliantly, dynamically, and now
dangerously one-sidedly solar-dominated civilization in history, with our
collective world view and modus vivendi in which the one very bright
light of the limited day sky ruled by the Sun puts into shadow the many
lights of the deep night sky ruled by the Moon, bringing clarity over
mystery, spirit over soul as Hillman would put it, solar transcendent
illumination over sublunary immanent earth, the head over the body, above
over below, centralized order over fertile chaos, executive control over
the unpredictabilities of life and death, the part over the whole,
knowledge over not-knowing, certainty over uncertainty, conscious self
over “the unconscious” (or rather, over all that a certain form of solar
consciousness is unconscious of): the individual will-directed
ego-consciousness over the pervading anima mundi, the Hero
archetype with a thousand faces over the Great Mother with a thousand
faces of her own.

We see this extraordinary solar potency already developing in
embryo in the evolution of that new nexus of differentiated
intentionality and discernment in the primitive animal brain itself out
of the groping eukaryote organisms of the Precambrian Proterozoic Eon,
and then evolving, differentiating, strengthening, and complexifying ever
further in vertebrates, tetrapods, mammals, primates, hominids, Homo
sapiens – the Promethean control of fire, of plants and animals and land
and water, the capacity for linguistic and religious symbolization, then
increasingly large, complex, hierarchical societies, king and pharaoh at
the top of vast social pyramids of centralized mind and will identified
with a transcendent god. And then this solar dominance becomes most
explicit in Akhenaten’s revolution of solar monotheism in ancient Egypt,
and the ancient Hebrew God’s “Let there be light” of the biblical
Genesis, on to Plato’s Sun as the divine Reason, the Solar Logos, and
then to the Copernican Revolution itself that cosmologically ratified the
solar dominance, Pope’s “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God
said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light”. Then – and this was the
crucial shift – modern man’s profound identification with that brilliant
all-illuminating Sun, shining the light of human reason on the entire
universe as with a God’s eye view, introjecting the Solar Logos and
becoming the heliocentric self, decathecting from the Earth, rising above
nature in objective knowledge, prediction and control, the Cartesian
monotheistic ego, the Enlightenment of ever-progressing conscious man
over unconscious nature and cosmos, and finally the exploding supernova
of modernity.

All this forges that disenchanted modern world dominated by “the
light of common day”, a cosmos that, as Wordsworth recognized, had
gradually, with the passage of time into the “realism” of modern
maturity, lost its depths, its interiority, its wholeness, its music, its
numinosity, its very meaning.

Pascal already saw this emerging in the mid-seventeenth century:
“I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite
spaces.”

And by the later nineteenth century, Nietzsche felt the full
implications. Declaring the death of God, by which he meant the
destruction of the metaphysical world, he used hyper-Copernican imagery
to express the pathos of the late modern condition, with the horizon of
meaning that had encompassed humankind for millennia now destroyed:

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we
doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving
now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there
still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite
nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become
colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

For this enormous development of our bright
modern solar consciousness left out the depths, the lunar mystery, the
soul of the cosmos. But the problem of disenchantment is not just
psychological, philosophical, or spiritual. It’s pragmatic, and in the
most global way. Why is cosmology so important? Because a cosmology is
the container for everything that happens within a civilization – all
the thinking, the assumptions, the actions, the strategies, the economics
and politics, the ecology, the self-image of the human being, one’s role
in the larger scheme of things and in every specific situation one finds
oneself in. A disenchanted world view empowers the utilitarian mindset,
so that efficiency and control, power and profit, become the highest
values governing the society.

In such a world, literally nothing is sacred, because the whole
has been desacralized: everything can be objectified and commodified,
ancient forests nothing but potential lumber, mountains become mining
projects, children’s minds marketing targets. Our relation to the
universe becomes I-It rather than I-Thou. The need to fill the spiritual
hunger of this cosmically isolated consciousness, combined with the
imperatives of corporate profit and personal greed, produces a
technoconsumerist frenzy that is cannibalizing the planet and threatening
to crash the entire Cenozoic Era. Now our civilization’s vaunted
“Progress” doesn’t look so great. “Now you don’t talk so loud, now you
don’t seem so proud . . . .

How does it feel
to be on your own
with no direction home
like a complete unknown
like a rolling stone?1

What is the ultimate impact of cosmic disenchantment on a
civilization? What does it do to the human self, year after year,
century after century, to experience existence as a conscious purposeful
being in an unconscious purposeless universe? No civilization has ever
tried this experiment before, to sustain itself with such a world view.
The looming question of our time has become: What is the price of a
collective belief in absolute cosmic indifference? What are the
consequences of this unprecedented cosmological context for the human
experiment, for the entire planet?

Thus the famous prophecy by the great sociologist Max Weber, who
first formulated the concept of modernity’s disenchantment of the
world:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the
future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new
prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and
ideals, or if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort
of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural
development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit,
sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a
level of civilization never before achieved.”

All this is why James Hillman asserted, in his seminal essay
“Anima Mundi: The Return of Soul to the World”:

Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism,
protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the
world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They
require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a
move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal
source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the
repression, of the anima mundi.

Many years ago Haridas Chaudhuri, the founder of the graduate
school where I teach, the California Institute of Integral Studies,
stated that “in our present age we need a worldview which takes into
account the fundamental requirements of the age as well as the basic
aspirations of the evolving human psyche. We need a worldview which shows
how our deepest aspirations are related to the essential structure of the
universe."

What Chaudhuri was affirming as a requirement of our age is
precisely what our civilization’s mainstream world view does not
provide. In fact the modern mind has ruled such a cosmological vision out
of court as fundamentally impossible in a universe that, objectively
understood, has no intrinsic meaning or purpose other than what the human
being brings into it (that’s the modern view). Or if the universe has
meaning, it is only one of many, a purely local interpretation serving
local cultural needs and power interests (that’s the academically
inflected postmodern view).

And yet surely this is the great task of our age, to develop
a coherent moral and imaginative vision for the future of our planetary
culture that is connected to the cosmos itself.

Astrology carries this precious connection to the cosmos. It is a
kind of golden key out of the iron cage. It carries a fundamental
correction to cosmic disenchantment and alienation. But this brings us
back to the paradox we began with, for if astrology is a golden key to
cosmic reenchantment, it is also, as we saw, the gold standard of
superstition.

Part II

And here I begin part two of the lecture, as I want to introduce
the idea of “heroic” communities and their crucial role in the postmodern
world -- and, equally to the point, their crucial role for the postmodern
world view; or rather lack of world view, since all is
indeed in radical flux, incoherence, and uncertainty.

By “heroic” I mean communities who are consciously oriented toward
a framework of values, or a vision of the true and the good, which
fundamentally challenges that of the larger mainstream society. Here I
would include learning communities such as the Astrological Association,
and the international astrological community itself; such as CIIS where I
teach, as well as communities like the Bioneers, and Jung Institutes, and
Waldorf Steiner schools – so too Esalen in Big Sur where I lived and
worked for many years, and Findhorn in Scotland, Damanhur in Italy,
Schumacher and Emerson College in England, Auroville in India, Naropa in
Colorado, Omega and the Open Center in New York, the Institute of Noetic
Sciences, the International Transpersonal Association, the Scientific and
Medical Network, and so forth. I obviously include here nonlocal
communities, so significant in our digital and wired era. And also,
ultimately, I include atemporal communities, that extend back in time,
over the centuries, giving us roots, inspiration, even dialogical
communication.

We absolutely need to have communities that can together sustain
the enormous act of the spiritual and intellectual imagination that can
vivify and co-creatively participate in the reawakening of a meaningful
cosmology for our civilization.

But “heroic” usually refers to the individual as distinct from the
group, the community. Indeed, I’m taking the term “heroic” from the
Oxford philosopher Charles Taylor’s discussion in Sources of the
Self of that deep tradition in the West of the heroic stance,
whether that of the individual philosopher like Socrates or the
individual prophet like Isaiah, which defines a moral vision in sharp
contrast to the larger community, and in spite of that society’s often
intense antagonism. Our civilization’s fundamental spiritual and
intellectual traditions coming from ancient Greece and ancient Israel
have fostered the heroic individual stance, which breaks out of the
historical community, the tribe of Israel, the polis of Athens. The
Hebrew prophet and the Greek philosopher experience a direct individual
relationship to a higher source of truth, a transcendent domain of
meaning, value, and purpose, bringing forth a vision that is experienced
as superior to the collective consensus, and perhaps necessary for the
future of the society.

In a sense, we see here in the ancient Greeks and Hebrews onward a
fusion of the ideal of heroism and the ideal of wisdom (spiritual,
intellectual, and moral vision): thus the transformation we see from
Achilles to Odysseus in the epics of Homer, then to Oedipus in the plays
of Sophocles, and finally to Socrates in the dialogues of Plato.
Similarly from Israel’s early warrior kings to the great prophets like
Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Isaiah, and on to Jesus.

The great historical shift that brought forth these revolutions of
consciousness in Greece and Israel during what Karl Jaspers called the
Axial Age also took place in India and China at the same time, with the
Upanisads and the Buddha, Mahavira, Confucius and Lao-tse. Thus the
prophet in Israel and the philosopher in Greece were paralleled by the
mystic in India and the sage in China. In each case, the individual
spirit broke through the archaic divine-king political-religious-cosmic
hierarchies and thereby connected as individuals directly to a higher
source of truth and being.

But heroic individualism was especially nurtured and pronounced in
the Western tradition, visible in the intensely juridical relation of the
individual before a historically engaged God, in Judaism and
Christianity, from Abraham and Moses to Paul and Augustine, culminating
in Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. And this heroic
individualism in the West was also impelled in accord with the Greek
stress on a form of democratic-rationalist individualism and independent
intellectual judgment rooted in a higher principle of mind, critically
analyzing the empirical world. Together these two root streams – Hellenic
and Hebraic, climaxing in the Scientific Revolution and Reformation
respectively – helped bring forth the modern age and modern spirit.

With modernity came the decisive emergence of the individual self
in an objective world. And it was this modern form of a radical heroic
individualism – of the Cartesian rational egoic human subject in a
neutralized objectified universe – that has produced the situation we
find ourselves in today. In retrospect, we can see that the peculiar
achievement of the distinctively modern ‘prophet-philosopher’, namely the
scientist, was to discern a new, higher truth beyond the old
myths and assumptions, and who through his powerfully developed
individual reason and his Promethean tools – telescope, microscope,
equations – bring forth a vast new cosmology that completely overturned
the ancient spiritually informed world views that had always encompassed
human experience.

And it is precisely this situation we find ourselves in today that
requires not only heroic individuals but heroic communities. For
in a disenchanted universe, we cannot, as isolated individuals, bring
forth a cosmology of meaning and purpose. We cannot sustain the
tremendous act of the co-creative participatory imagination that would
allow the constellating of an ensouled cosmology in a civilization that
has voided the anima mundi and appropriated all the cosmos’s
soul, spirit, mind, purpose and meaning to the human self. We can only do
this great defiant act of new axial vision in communities. The individual
cannot do it alone.

Partly this can be understood in terms of Charles Taylor’s
perceptive analysis concerning the necessity of frameworks of meaning and
value, of that ‘moral space’ within which our identities are grounded
and oriented. To sustain such moral space or frames of reference requires
the possibility of communication and shared meanings in communities. Even
heroes cannot do without a community. As Taylor put it, “Taking the
heroic stance does not allow one to leap out of the human condition.” My
selfhood is defined and nurtured and forged only in a community of other
selves with which I am in dialogical relation.

But I want to extend this analysis further, to say that not only
does the individual need a community to articulate and actualize herself,
today our civilization needs a new kind of heroic community –
many heroic communities -- for its own future and for the future
of the planet. For a transformation of the collective psyche itself is
needed. As Jung said in his famous description of our time as a
kairos moment – the right moment for a changing of the gods, a
transformation of the fundamental principles and symbols – the future of
the world depends on the rapidly changing state of the human psyche.

Today we are having to evolve and discern, through rigor and
imagination, a new cosmos within which our human actions and thoughts
will be both coherent and life-enhancing. Only a community can hold space
for such a transformation, for the emergence and articulation of a new –
and in some sense ancient – cosmology. Individual heroic intuitions and
assertions cannot succeed in this task on their own.

Without a community there cannot be articulation, because there is
no common language, as Taylor said, no matrix within which we can forge
our identity and framework of meaning. But more than this, a community
also provides that necessary emotional and spiritual “holding space” for
each other to go deep within to connect to that ground of meaning that is
not being recognized by the externally culturally-validated cosmos. For
the journey is often a difficult and perilous one, psychologically as
well as every other way. The true solar hero not only ascends, she must
also descend, go down like the Sun, the day dying into the night, to be
reborn in the dark crucible of the deep psyche. Thus the old self is
deconstructed in order to be transformed, allowing the solar and lunar to
unite in the alchemical hieros gamos, or sacred marriage. Such a
profound process requires individuals to be held caringly in
communities.

So in one way, we have to overcome the go-it-alone heroic stance
that goes back to our ancient roots and to our modern foundations. But in
other ways, we absolutely require that heroic stance, of the prophet and
philosopher and scientist, but we need to do it in community, in beloved
communities, to use the philosopher Josiah Royce’s phrase.

More could be said of this, but now we must move forward to one
more critical point: Many of us remember John Addey’s thrilling Carter
Memorial Lecture from 1971, Astrology Reborn, with his famous
declaration that it seemed astrology was about to assume once again an
almost central role in our culture and in scientific thought. And in a
sense this conviction and hope remains true and worthy. But in another
sense, this great renascence of astrology did not rapidly emerge as
perhaps John and Charles and so many felt would happen at the time, as if
we were on the very cusp of astrology’s widespread acceptance and
recognition by the high culture’s intelligentsia and larger society
alike: virtually proved by massive statistical research and double-blind
tests, and accompanied by the intellectual elite’s rapid psychospiritual
evolution and awakening.

But the mystery of astrology was more profound, more complex, more
subtle, more relational than that, and the structures of the modern
self’s armored differentation from the ensouled cosmos more resistant
than that. And we might say that astrology’s own journey and that of the
astrological community itself through its underworld of transformation,
its cultural exile, its external negation and inner gestation, was to be
much longer. And this is perhaps very much as it should be.

The scholarship had to deepen and expand, there had to be greater
critical rigor, more thoughtful philosophical self-reflection and
epistemological self-awareness, more translations and better
understanding of the texts of the various traditions, greater precision
of birth data collection, greater biographical and historical
scholarship, a slow but definite re-entrance into the academy and higher
education, a deepening integration of depth psychology, of archetypal
psychology and transpersonal psychology, of feminist theory and
postmodern thought, a more sophisticated understanding of archetypal
symbolism, complexes, powers and gods.

We absolutely need to have communities that can
sustain...the reawakening of a meaningful cosmology
for our civilization

And perhaps our civilization itself and the world has had to
descend deeper into its great initiatory crisis, its encounter
with mortality on a planetary scale, with the responsibility of Homo
sapiens and of modernity for the ecological catastrophe of our time, the
facing of its shadow, the crisis of meaning, the deconstruction of its
old identity.

We don’t know how this will unfold, either for astrology or for
our civilization. So much is uncertain. Yet we know that uncertainty is
essential for any true and powerful initiatory transformation. Nothing
reconfigures existential values more than the encounter with one’s
mortality, and one cannot have a pretend near-death experience. The risk
must be real.

Thus it seems the astrological community needs to enact both a
solar role and a lunar role in this crucial moment of history: It needs
to bring to the larger culture a clarity of illumination to the deep
mysteries of the night sky, the anima mundi, the unconscious, the
interior of the cosmos and the depths of our own being, carrying a kind
of prophetic light of deeper understanding. Yet it must also serve as a
nourishing community to itself, providing a vessel within which
individuals can find their own vision of the anima mundi that
has been so negated by the mainstream mindset.

Moreover, we must be conscious of the shadow potential of any
heroic community, that of becoming a cult, uncritical, uniform,
sequestered and isolated: So the astrological community must strive to
be a pluralistic matrix of genuine individuation for its many members,
beyond any totalizing dogma. My own orientation is grounded in the
Platonic-Pythagorean-Keplerian archetypal tradition, with Jung and
Rudhyar, Carter and Ebertin, Harvey and Hand, Arroyo and Greene as
especially valuable guides. But there are many noble modes of the
astrological revelation: Hellenistic, medieval, horary and divinatory,
Arabic, Jyotish, Uranian, cosmobiological, harmonic, shamanic,
psychological, and more. All constitute this larger community.

And the astrological community must also be externally
porous, open to the larger world, building bridges to that world by being
comprehensible and relationally engaged, not locked into narrow jargon
and abstruse vocabularies. We must seek to become competent, even
excellent, in other fields beyond the astrological – as historians and
biographers, as therapists and physicians, as economists, philosophers,
priests, rabbis, ministers, physicists, astronomers, business people,
social workers, community organizers – so that our articulation of
astrology carries credibility with the larger culture and be more potent,
efficacious, valuable. Our continuing dialogue with the whole – the
astrological heroic solar principle with the surrounding lunar matrix of
our larger culture – in turn keeps us growing, self-critical and
self-revising, just as we as individuals constantly need the containment
of relationships to both actualize and transcend ourselves.

So we cannot do it alone – neither as individuals, nor as a
community, not even the larger astrological community itself. There are
many diverse heroic communities carrying their special tasks in this
critical time. Yet the astrological community is perhaps carrying an
especially crucial gift, a cosmically healing gift, healing the rupture
of heaven and earth, of psyche and cosmos, of inner and outer, of self
and world, with unique comprehensiveness and precision and depth.
Ultimately, what the astrological community does for its individual
members – holding space for our learning, our seeking, our
transformation, our initiation – is a reflection of what astrology’s
recognition of the ensouled cosmos does for the Earth community: It
holds cosmic space itself as a numinous matrix within which our
civilization and species might go through the planetary crisis and
threshold of transformation, as an initation into the larger ensouled
cosmos, returning to the community of life as a co-creative participant
in a larger evolving mystery. Astrology opens us to a sense of trust and
faith in a larger coherence of cosmic meaning, to a universe whose
astonishing ceaseless orchestration of above and below suggests that in
some sense it cares for this Earth, and indeed for every
individual, every moment. We are not an isolated oddity of consciousness
in a random unconscious universe, a meaning-seeking speck of dust in a
vast cosmic void. We are participants in something much greater, a cosmos
of vast meaning and purpose. With that ground of trust in the universe
afforded to us by the astrological revelation, we can perhaps serve as a
subtly healing and centering presence for the larger human community, as
we all undergo the profound initiatory transformation of our age.

Richard Tarnas is professor of
philosophy and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral
Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in
Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He is the author of The Passion
of the Western Mind, a history of Western thought from the ancient Greek
to the postmodern widely used in universities, and Cosmos and Psyche,
which received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical
Network in the UK. Formerly president of the International Transpersonal
Association, he is on the Board of Governors of the C. G. Jung Institute
of San Francisco.

The Astrological Association is a registered charity dedicated to the support and promotion of astrology in all its branches. For over fifty years, it has been serving the astrological community through informing and bringing together astrologers from all over the world, via its stable of publications, its annual Conference, Kepler Research Day and other occasional events, and its support of local astrological groups. It also represents the interests of astrologers generally, responding when appropriate to issues raised within the media.

The first book available in English by the great French master astrologer Andre Barbault. The Value of Astrology offers incisive, captivating insights into the origins, classical tradition and modern uses of astrology.

As one of the largest astrology portals WWW.ASTRO.COM offers a lot of free features on the subject. With high-quality horoscope interpretations by the world's leading astrologers Liz Greene, Robert Hand and other authors, many free horoscopes and extensive information on astrology for beginners and professionals, www.astro.com is the first address for astrology on the web.